place, or, to put it another way, by consistently speaking dia-
logue that normally answers the speech of others and is about
to be answered itself. Real people sometimes have such dialecti-
cal encounters, but their speech is also packed with purposeless
chatter, “noise.” The dramatist eliminates the noise and intensi-
fies the dialectic. All dramatists try to do that. Musical drama
has a second way of creating intensified character that is not
dialectic but lyrical. The idea that characters in either kind of
play are “real” means that the dialectical or the lyrical conven-
tions are so well managed that we forget we are watching a
play—suspend our disbelief some would say—and fall into the
attitude that these are actual people in actual situations. Shake-
speare’s and Chekhov’s characters can be real in this sense too.
The question is, what does a musical add to this intense theatri-
cality by virtue of having a book-and-number alternation?
Maria’s final number falters and stops. She sings a few bars of
“A Place for Us.” Tony tries to join her, then he dies. Stephen
Banfield shrewdly notes that the failed number has the effect of
song, song recognized in its denial.^2 The orchestra continues be-
yond the singer, leading to the procession that follows, when the
two gangs together carry off Tony’s body, Maria following be-
hind, to the music of their earlier dream ballet about getting free
of the tenements. The music organizes their grief. Maria has cer-
tainly changed. She has been a charming and passionate ingénue
through the action, but when Tony dies, she acquires a sudden
forcefulness. Her voice hard and flat with rage, she takes up a
gun and asks how many gang members she can kill while saving
one bullet for herself. Then she takes charge of the gangs instead,
having them join hands and carry the body away, in the real final
number. “Te adoro, Anton” is her spoken farewell to her lover.
She breaks out in tears, but she will never be girlish again. The
dramatization is strong and believable. Mordden must have mo-
ments like this in mind when he calls the young lovers “real.”
Think back to Maria’s earlier numbers. Sondheim has accused
himself of miswriting her lyric in “I Feel Pretty,” giving her
rhymes that seem too witty for a Puerto Rican girl relatively new
CHARACTER AND VOICE OF THE MUSICAL 55
(^2) Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, p. 290.